Pipelining and Components

Abstract

Pipelines are probably the least properly utilized tools in the BizTalk toolbox. Pipelines are designed to do one thing well: Examine and potentially modify messages or convoys of messages as they are received and sent to/from the Messagebox

The most important words in the preceding statement are “Examine” and “Modify.” As stated previously, messages in BizTalk are immutable once they have entered the Messagebox. The only proper way to affect a message is to change it in a pipeline either on the send side or the receive side. Before starting a new custom pipeline, it is important to understand that a pipeline by itself does nothing. The real work is accomplished by the pipeline components that are attached to the pipeline. If you are building custom pipelines, 99% of your time will be spent in coding the custom pipeline components, not in building the actual pipeline.